A week ago I asked on the MGoBoard what people wanted to see me write about in the future and I got plenty of good ideas, which I'll try to fulfill in the coming weeks. The first and most immediate one that made sense were the multiple requests for a summary or update of non-revenue sports results. So this is the first installment of our non-revenue sports roundup column. Since it's the first one and we've got a ton of sports to cover, I decided to narrow this down quite a bit. Spring sports like golf, tennis, and track & field have quite a bit of the season to go, so I will get to them in a future edition. Today we're looking at the fall sports, field hockey, soccer(s), cross country (x2), and volleyball. 

Field Hockey

Let's start with Michigan's most consistently great fall sport, field hockey. It was another solid season for the team, although they had a disappointing early exit from the NCAA Tournament. Their regular season results were fine, 5-3 in the conference and tied for 3rd, with a litany of tough one-goal losses to elite competition (including those in the B1G). Penn State and Maryland tied for the B1G regular season title, but Michigan made a statement down in Columbus at the Big Ten Tournament. Always a competitive event in a conference as stacked as the B1G, Michigan ran the gauntlet and won three games in four days. They knocked off national #9 Iowa (5th in the B1G) 3-0 on Thursday, then beat national #3 PSU (1st in the B1G) in a thrilling 2-1 win on the backs of two goals from Kathryn Peterson on Friday. That propelled Michigan to the championship game on Sunday, where they beat national #4 Northwestern (tied with Michigan in the B1G) 2-1, dominating the 'Cats in shots and using two early goals to get it done. 

That triumph crowned Michigan as B1G Tournament Champions, the program's second title in three seasons and eighth overall. The strong performance in Columbus secured Michigan the national 4th seed for the 2022 NCAA Field Hockey Tournament, hosting the regional in Ann Arbor. That's where it all came to a disappointing end, a heartbreaking 2-1 loss in OT to #16 Albany. Michigan's Tina D'Anjolell scored the game's opening goal but Floor de Ruiter tied it with under three minutes to go in regulation for the Great Danes to send it into the extra session, which would end on Sophia Schoonmaker's breakaway goal. 

It was a brutal end to another strong season, but there is plenty to be proud of. A Big Ten Tournament title lives forever and is another mark of the sustained success of Marcia Pankratz's program. There were also individual honorees to mention: Katie Anderson was named All-B1G 1st Team, while Nina Apoola, Kathryn Peterson, and Anna Spieker were named All-B1G 2nd Team. Apoola also was the team's honoree for the Sportsmanship Award. There will be some attrition in the offseason, particularly among the midfielders and goalkeeper, but the team's top three goalscorers/pointsgetters were all juniors or younger, so there is a core to work with next season. Expecting continued success is merely the program standard. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: More sports]

[David Wilcomes]

The Soccers 

I'm lumping both men's and women's soccer in to one category here because neither have a ton to discuss after tough seasons. Let's start with the men's team, which had their worst record in eleven seasons under coach Chaka Daley. They finished with a 4-10-3 record, 9th in the B1G, which was too low in the standings to qualify for the B1G Tournament, the first time under Daley the Wolverines have missed the BTT. Obviously, the team also missed the NCAAs, the third straight season they've missed the big dance following three straight tourney berths from 2017-19. It's been a considerable fall under Daley and the program now has to figure out how to steer the ship back around. 

Among the team's many problems was an anemic offense that mustered just 19 goals in 17 games, 143rd in the NCAA (out of 203) in goals per game. They also allowed 28 goals, a 1.647 GAA that ranked 154th. With a -9 goal differential, this was a bad team... but I suppose the record says that too. If there's good news, I suppose it's that starting goalie Hayden Evans and leading scorer Nicholas Kaloukian are both underclassmen, so maybe they can form the nucleus of a stronger club moving forward. Kaloukian and Nolan Miller were both named to the All-Freshman team in the B1G, the team's only honorees. Michigan Men's Soccer has plenty of recruiting talent on their roster, as much as any team in the conference, and the results will need to return to mirroring that or else Daley may be on his way out the door. 

Unfortunately, the women's soccer season wasn't much better. It was better than the men, but still subpar. The team ended the season with a 7-8-3 record, a year after making the NCAA Quarterfinals, not what anyone was hoping for or expecting. They entered the season preseason #9 but proceeded to have the worst season of the Jennifer Klein era, joining the men in missing the B1G Tournament and NCAAs. The defense was solid, but a dismal offense that saw them get shut out seven times in ten B1G games(!) was the bane of their existence. High scoring efforts in the non-conference did not hold up once the team faced tougher competition, scoring 20 goals in three games against carcass teams and just eleven in the other 15 games(!!). That's not gonna get it done. 

The team did have one All-B1G honoree, forward Meredith Haakenson, who was named Third Team All-B1G. The hope moving forward is a bounceback season, which has happened under Klein. The team missed the NCAA Tournament with .500-ish seasons in 2018 and 2020 and proceeded to make the tournament the next season both times, so here's to hoping that 2023 follows that pattern. 

[Michigan Photography]

The Cross Countrys 

Again we're grouping these two fall sports together, in part because I don't have too much to say about them. The men's cross country team was one of two nationally ranked squads in the B1G, above the rest of the conference but still well behind the kings of the league Wisconsin. The Wolverines took 2nd at the B1G Championships, which were hosted in Ann Arbor this year, starting strong but eventually being surpassed by the Badgers to take their expected place in the event. From there the team went on to the NCAA Great Lakes Regional in Terre Haute, Indiana, in need of a strong showing to earn a bid to the NCAA Championships, and a 3rd place finish out of 29 teams was enough to get it done. Veterans Tom Brady (yes, that is his name) and Arjun Jha, the consistently best runners all season for the Wolverines, led the team to a finish at the event enough to punch their ticket to Stillwater, Oklahoma. That's where it came to an end, with Michigan finishing 29th out of 31 teams in the 10 km event. Brady again had the team's best time, taking 60th out of over 200 runners, while Jha was 161st and Zach Stewart was 153rd. Overall, a tepid season, meeting expectations but nothing anyone will write home about. 

The funny thing is how similar the women's cross country season was to the men. Just like the men, they took 2nd in the B1G Championships, though in their case it was a bit of a surprise, finishing ahead of two higher seeded teams in the conference (OSU and Wisconsin), but still behind Michigan State. Also like the men's team, Michigan's women's XC team took 3rd at the Great Lakes Regional to punch their ticket to Stillwater, where they finished in the 20s as well. However, the women took 22nd out of 31 teams, a better finish than the men's team. That said, they fell short of their goal to be a top 10 team. The star of the women's team this season was Ericka VanderLende, the team's top performing runner in all three postseason events. Kayla
Windemuller deserves recognition for finishing 1st among Wolverines at many of the early season meets, though the Maize & Blue didn't collect many postseason awards. Both teams were good but not great and their performance reflected that. 

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

Volleyball 

The Michigan Volleyball team has been undergoing some substantial turnover and shakeup in the past few months after a bummer of a year led to the firing of longtime head coach Mark Rosen, something made stranger by the revelation that the athletic department had signed him to a five year extension only months before terminating his contract. We'll get into that in a minute, but first let's talk about the season that was. Coming off an 11-9 finish in the B1G in 2021 and an NCAA Tournament berth, the Wolverines were looking to keep the momentum going. They swept through the early non-conference tournaments against lesser opponents, but as is always the case in volleyball, you don't know too much until you enter the B1G slate and face the murderer's row of opponents that lurk in this stacked conference. 

Michigan started pretty strong, 2-0 in league play with a road upset of a top ten PSU team and they were 3-1 after four games into early October before the house started to collapse. After beating Northwestern on October 1, they would win just one game until Halloween weekend, going 1-6 and getting slapped around by the big dogs of the conference, 3-0 defeats at the hands of Minnesota, Nebraska, and Ohio State. Even after they beat MSU at the end of October, the season didn't get much better and in total the team was 3-10 over a stretch lasting into mid-November. By that point, their hopes for the season had fallen to pieces and a 2-1 finish to close the year, including a warm send-off to the seniors in the final game against Rutgers, wasn't going to be enough to get them into the NCAAs. Final record: 17-13, 8-12 in the B1G and 9th in the league standings. No postseason. Jess Murzik was named 1st Team All-B1G and Hannah Grant made 2nd Team, but there wasn't a ton else to be pleased about with the season. 

[David Wilcomes]

Which perhaps is why Warde Manuel opted to move on from Mark Rosen, which was announced on December 20, 2022. It was a startling move, given how long Rosen was with Michigan, but I can't say it was completely unjustified. The program had established a standard of consistently making the tournament and now has missed two of three seasons. Moreover, even when they were making the tournament, it felt like they'd hit a bit of a ceiling under Rosen, topping out at 11-9/12-8 or so in B1G play pretty consistently. I don't think it's crazy to want a fresh start for the program, but the revelation that he had been fired so soon after signing an extension indicated a rather significant *rapid* change of opinion by leadership (Warde). Can't say I know what is behind that, but at the same time, the repercussions are not massive, $1 M in buyout money which in the grand scheme of college athletics at a school like Michigan is peanuts. 

So who is replacing Rosen? That would be 39-year-old Erin Virtue, a former Rosen assistant. An Illinois native who played college volleyball for the Fighting Illini, she began her coaching career at Loyola-Chicago as an assistant before moving on to Cincinnati and then Michigan. Virtue was under Rosen from 2011-15, a period that included the 2012 run to the national semifinal, the best NCAA finish of Rosen's entire tenure. After that she had a small stint as associate head coach of Northwestern before focusing on being the assistant for Team USA, a job she began in 2017. With the national team, Virtue won gold at the 2020(1) Tokyo Olympics, so while she has ties to Rosen and the Michigan program, she's sufficiently outside it to be able to provide some new perspectives and answers of how to get the Wolverines to the next level. It's hard to assess a coaching hire when the incoming head coach has zero head coaching experience, but the track record here is intriguing and if nothing else, it's trying something new as opposed to a decades-long regime that seemed to have topped out. I'm curious to see where it leads.